By the time I sat down for lunch at The Line, I had already spent enough of my stay at Shangri-La Singapore to understand the hotel’s temperament. It likes generosity. It likes space. It likes doing things properly and then letting you discover that at your own pace. I wrote about that in my Shangri-La Singapore hotel review. Lunch followed the same logic. It was not trying to be fashionable. It was trying to be dependable, abundant, and quietly impressive in the old-school hotel way. During my stay, The Line’s lunch buffet ran from 12:00pm to 2:30pm at S$68++ per adult.
One-Line Verdict: The Line’s lunch buffet is exactly the sort of grand hotel buffet Shangri-La should be doing. Big spread, strong service, a few genuinely memorable dishes, and just enough old-fashioned confidence to make excess feel oddly reassuring.
The Room Puts You In A Buffet Mood
Some buffet restaurants feel like they expect you to behave badly.
The Line does not.
It is a large room, yes, but it does not feel frantic from the start. The space has enough confidence to let lunch unfold without trying to stage-manage your excitement. Shangri-La presented a broad international buffet built around nine live stations and a mix of Middle Eastern, Indian, Western, Peranakan, and Asian dishes, and that is more or less how it plays out in real life. It is not trying to be one cuisine or even three. It is trying to feed a room full of people with wildly different lunch priorities and somehow still make the whole thing feel coherent.
That is harder than it sounds.
The Moment I Stopped Trying To Be Fair
The Line is the sort of buffet that punishes fairness.
There is simply too much of it to approach with equal-minded enthusiasm unless you enjoy disappointment as a dining style. So I stopped pretending I needed to “sample widely” and paid attention to what actually pulled me in. For me, this time it was not the cold section. It was the local line, the noodle stations and the parts of the buffet that felt like they belonged in Singapore rather than in some generic international hotel fantasy.
That was the right decision.
The menu during that stretch included snow crab, prawns, sashimi, laksa, prawn noodle soup, fresh popiah, satay, butter chicken, lamb rogan josh, roasted wagyu bolar blade, crispy German pork knuckle, and a dessert line that moved from local kueh to more standard hotel sweets. It was broad in exactly the way The Line has always been broad.
The Food I Actually Wanted More Of
Once I stopped trying to eat for coverage, lunch became much easier to enjoy.
Their laksa was the first thing that felt genuinely worth a second helping. It had enough flavour and enough confidence to cut through the general buffet abundance. The prawn noodle soup also made sense in the room. I really liked the Nyonya-style fresh popiah more than I expected, partly because it gave the meal a little local texture without trying too hard. The satay did exactly what satay should do in a Singapore hotel buffet. It reminded me where I was without turning itself into a performance. The Indian section was another strong point. The butter chicken, lamb rogan josh, and warm naan gave lunch a kind of weight that balanced out the temptation to spend the whole meal hovering at the seafood.
That, for me, was where The Line stopped feeling like a room full of options and started feeling like an actual lunch.
The Carving Station Earned Its Space
I am usually suspicious of buffet carving stations because they so often rely on theatre rather than taste.
This one did enough to justify itself.
The roasted wagyu bolar blade had real presence and the crispy German pork knuckle was exactly the sort of slightly excessive buffet choice that only really makes sense when you are already staying in a large garden hotel and do not have to do anything urgent afterwards. I did not need huge amounts of either. But I respected them. That is sometimes the correct relationship to have with buffet meat.
The Trays I Left Alone Without Regret
This is the part that makes a buffet feel lived-in instead of theoretical.
Not every tray needs your attention. Some dishes are there because a buffet this size feels obliged to cover every possible lunch instinct. I skipped certain Western mains without ever feeling deprived. That is not a criticism. It is just the reality of a buffet this broad. The Line gets better once you stop trying to prove something to it. The point is not to eat the whole room. The point is to recognise where the room is strongest and let those dishes carry the meal.
That, I think, is why lunch worked. Not because every single item demanded loyalty, but because enough of it did.
Dessert Was A Test Of Character
Dessert at The Line is where self-respect gets tested.
The dessert menu during my visit included sweet treats such as speculoos cheesecake, durian mousse cake, kueh salat, ondeh ondeh and mango pomelo konnyaku, which was more than enough to make a sensible person briefly lose perspective. I kept it simple. The local sweets made more sense to me than another generic square of cake trying to look important. A little ondeh ondeh, a little kueh salat, and then I stopped before dessert became a separate event.
Why The Whole Meal Worked
What made lunch land for me was that it felt completely consistent with the hotel.
The Line is not trying to be a sleek concept restaurant where every plate arrives with a thesis. It is a grand, confident, slightly old-school hotel buffet in a hotel that still believes in doing things properly and at scale. The room stayed busy without tipping into stress. Plates disappeared before the table became ridiculous. Tea was topped up.
The whole thing moved with the same low-drama competence I had already noticed elsewhere in the stay. That matters. Buffets are not only about food. They are also about whether the experience remains civilised once everyone else has also arrived hungry.
The Line managed that.
Would I Actually Recommend It?
Yes, but only if you actually want this kind of lunch.
If what you want is a small, highly edited, design-conscious restaurant meal where every dish feels precious and the room is performing modernity at you, this is not that. The Line is much broader, much more generous, and much less self-conscious. But if you like proper hotel buffets, and you want one of the better old-school versions of that in Singapore, it still makes a very strong case for itself.
Especially during a Shangri-La stay, when leaving the cocoon for lunch suddenly feels like effort you do not need.
That was exactly my position, and I have no regrets about it.
Final Thoughts
What I liked most about The Line was that it never seemed embarrassed by what it was.
It did not try to slim itself down into elegance or pretend buffet abundance was somehow beneath it. It just offered a very large, very competent lunch buffet in a room that could absorb the scale of it. For me, the meal became memorable once I stopped treating it like a buffet checklist and started eating according to instinct. The local dishes, the noodle station, the more grounded parts of the room. That was where the lunch had real pull.
Now, the real question: would I go back? Yes.
But only with a plan. And definitely not with the delusion that I need to eat every section to prove I got my money’s worth.
Author Attribution
J.C. Yue is often in transit, and hotel buffets are her most reliable “in-between” meal in Singapore. She reviews hotel buffets for RERG based on what she actually ate, highlighting what’s worth returning for, and what isn’t.
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